‘Well, this is what it looks like,’ I continued. ‘These five black lines, we call that a stave.’
‘Why?’ he said, not moving a muscle. I couldn’t tell whether his rigidity was from fear of prompting another seizure, or sheer anxiety.
‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted. ‘That’s just what it’s called. The notes you play correspond to the black circles on or between the lines. For example, the bottom line on this stave is E, here,’ I said, pressing the note above Middle C. I had gotten ahead of myself, and way ahead of any beginner’s first lesson, let alone someone who had just experienced a seizure. But in a kind of immunisation theory of teaching the instrument, I believed Richard deserved maximum value for his minimal exposure to the piano.
Richard shifted in his seat and frowned. ‘But why?’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Who says that line means E?’
I was stumped. Not once had it occurred to me to question the basis of Western music notation.
‘Well, this system came into use hundreds of years ago,’ I began, struggling for an answer. Now I felt like a chump for never having wondered about it myself.
‘But why should it?’
If I were a better teacher—or any kind of teacher, really—I would have anticipated my student’s resistance and prepared a response to it. And I don’t know if anyone can learn anything while being under fire from one’s own brain. But Richard had started to irritate me.
How could I explain that we were stuck with the five-line staves as much as we were with the alphabet? Nothing can be altered in the ‘notation of music by dead masters’, Elfriede Jelinek wrote in her 1983 novel Die Klavierspielerin, which appeared in English five years later as The Piano Teacher. Her protagonist Erika Kohut, a failed concert performer, has shifted like the translated title from player to teacher, scaring the bejesus out of most of her students. Part of me wanted to believe Richard’s inference that an alternative system of notation might be possible. Who was I to dismiss the idea? I had learned the system in the traditional way and swallowed its prescriptions like medicine—reading black and white marks on staves of black lines, connecting them to the black and white notes on the keyboard. Now I was perpetuating the transfer of knowledge by teaching it without question to my own student. But Erika Kohut—living with her mother, tormented by sadomasochism and her artistic failure—is trapped by more than the notes:
Erika has been harnessed in this notation system since earliest childhood. Those five lines have been controlling her ever since she first began to think. She mustn’t think of anything but those five black lines. This grid system, together with her mother, has hamstrung her in an untearable net of directions, directives, precise commandments, like a rosy ham on a butcher’s hook. This provides security, and security creates fear of uncertainty. Erika is afraid that everything will remain as it is, and she is afraid that someday something could change.
Fearful of change, and terrified of things staying the same: that was me all over.
I looked at Richard. ‘Do you have an idea for how else we could notate music?’ I said. I wasn’t being facetious—part of me wondered if he had something of what was then called the idiot savant about him. Perhaps the peculiar wiring of his brain facilitated musical insights unavailable to those of us limited by more conventional neural pathways. If anyone could devise an alternative system, maybe it was him.
‘Not yet,’ he said, with no trace of irony.
Before I could embarrass myself further, Richard had two mini-fits in quick succession. ‘Let’s leave it for today,’ I said when he came to, relieved for an excuse to conclude the lesson.
I sent him back across the street with two pieces of homework: the first, to spend five minutes each day placing his right thumb on Middle C and stepping higher, note by note, using each finger of the right hand so as to familiarise himself with C, D, E, F and G; the second, to devise a new system of music notation. From behind the glass-panelled front door I watched him trudge up our short driveway to street level, cross the street and lean into the much steeper incline of the driveway to his home, which towered over ours. I’m not sure how his head felt, but mine was spinning.
Glancing out the kitchen window a few days later, I was astonished to spy Moby Dick through the floor-to-ceiling glass of Richard’s living room window. An enormous white grand piano sat becalmed on what I knew to be an ocean of thick pea-green carpet, its gleaming lid open in full sail. I had worried that Richard’s first lesson with me would also prove to be his last. Now, witnessing his parents’ extravagance, I knew my fears were unfounded.
I would never be a piano teacher.
23
ALICE’S LETTER FROM THE ADMIRALTY OFFICE, dated 5 March 1918, was exactly six months after her wedding. The letter informed Alice that her application for the Navy Separation Allowance had been rejected. The allowance consisted of a portion of a soldier’s pay, matched by the government, to provide for the dependents of those on active duty.
It’s not clear to me when Alice submitted her application. The Christmas season is hectic for a choirmistress in any year, but in late 1917 Alice would have had to rehearse two concert programs with choral parts she amended herself to counteract the imbalance in her two choirs. With the war still raging, she would have been missing—for a second year—most of her tenors, and was probably too heavy in the bass section, with more older men filling in the gaps of the younger ones away in service. Perhaps Alice waited until the new year to apply. Perhaps she hoped that she wouldn’t need it by then.
The letter declining her application, part of a bundle of correspondence my aunt Charlotte has kept for decades, contained an explanation, but it made no sense.
Madam,
With reference to your application for the grant of Navy separation allowance in respect of John Henry Edwards, Stoker Petty Officer 305849, I have to inform you that as it is reported that the man was already married and had a wife living when he went through a form of marriage with you in September last, it is regretted that you are not eligible for an allowance.
Your Certificate of Marriage is returned herewith.
Alice knew he’d been married. John had sat across from her at dinner and told her whole family the story. Ann had died in childbirth. The letter’s wording was ugly, but clearly there had been an administrative error.
James Taylor determined to get to the bottom of this bureaucratic puzzle for his daughter’s sake. Having expected that Alice would soon no longer represent a financial burden to him, James must have been outraged both for moral and financial reasons, and impatient for an answer. He sought the advice of George Bradley, a local solicitor.
The next six months unfolded between the pages of Mr Bradley’s correspondence with the Admiralty. At first, the office would provide no new information regarding their decision to decline Alice’s claim for support. They repeated their policy of not divulging additional details.
Admiralty,
10th July 1918
Sir/
In reply to your letter of the 15th ultimo, relative to the wife of John Henry Edwards, Stoker, Petty Officer, 305849, I have to inform you that it is regretted that the information asked for cannot be furnished.
I have to add that all the circumstances were fully investigated in connection with the claim to Navy Separation Allowance received from this Petty Officer’s present Allottee, and that the Department is satisfied that the facts are as represented in the letter addressed to her on the 5th March last.
I am, Sir,
Your obedient Servant,
(sgd) Frank Porter,
pr Accountant-General of the Navy.
But Mr Bradley, who would not take no for an answer, wrote again to the Admiralty. This time he set out in greater detail the circumstances in which Alice May Morrison Edwards, née Taylor, found herself in the summer of 1918.
Let’s put ourselves in Alice’s shoes as she greets John Henry Edwards, the man she married la
st September at the church she grew up in, as he returns to Glasgow for a conjugal visit. It’s not clear exactly when he arrived, though from the correspondence I conclude it must have been in early summer. Did she greet him at the docks, or wait impatiently at home? Had she dreamed of being alone with her husband again, in whatever version of privacy the newlyweds—who until now had only spent a handful of days together—could muster? Perhaps she was torn between excitement, anticipation and an anxious knot in her stomach. On seeing his new wife again, did John lift Alice in his arms? Hug her with his whole body? Or greet her awkwardly, like the almost-stranger that she was? Even if Alice briefly regretted marrying him so soon after meeting him, I suspect, on seeing him again, she felt immediately reassured by his presence.
We don’t know what, if anything, John knew about the Admiralty Office’s decision before coming ashore. We don’t know what Alice’s mother made of the letter, though it’s easy enough to imagine her being horrified at the mere hint of impropriety in relation to her daughter, even if it would turn out to be a simple clerical error. We will never know just how awkward the reunion was.
As expected, John Henry Edwards gave his wife and his in-laws a perfectly reasonable explanation for the mix-up. The ‘present Allottee’ of his Navy Separation Allowance was his dear mother. The mistake had all been his, in not informing the Admiralty of the change in his marital status. He apologised to Alice, James and Charlotte, reassuring them that he would sort everything out.
Did they believe him?
Would you?
As John was on a brief shore leave, he was desperate to be with his new wife. And, despite the bureaucratic bungle, she with him, I imagine. But I find it difficult to see Alice taking her husband upstairs to her bed while her parents were in the house. Perhaps Charlotte and James Taylor begrudgingly gave the newlyweds some time alone, and spent an afternoon staring into their drinks, thinking all the thoughts they dared not say out loud. Or they gave John the benefit of the doubt because they knew his history and it made sense that he’d been sending money to his mother after he had been widowed. Or they were riddled with doubt but from neither a legal nor moral standpoint could do anything about it, until Mr Bradley could pressure the Admiralty for an answer.
In early July, John Henry Edwards went back to sea aboard the Mameluke. On 10 July, a letter arrived from the Admiralty. Again their office refused to supply further information. One week later, Mr Bradley composed the following letter in response. It paints a vivid picture of the anxiety and despair now gripping the household at 370 Dumbarton Road.
102 Bath Street,
Glasgow, 18th July 1918
The Accountant General of the navy, Admiralty,
4a Newgate Street,
London, E. C. 1
Sir,
I duly received your reply dated 10th inst. to my letter to you of 15th ultimo, relative to the wife of John Henry Edwards, Stoker Petty Officer, 305849, and your refusal to supply information asked.
I must ask you for your authority for withholding information. My client who supposes herself to be the wife of this man is at present in a terrible position, as since I wrote you John Henry Edwards has been living with her during a short leave, after persuading my client and his daughter that it was his mother who was getting the allowance. My client and his daughter are respectable citizens of this country and should it be the case that the Department is satisfied with the facts, as represented in the letter addressed by you to the lady on 5th March last, she must at once be put in possession of the necessary details to release her from the intolerable position in which she finds herself.
All I require from you is the name and address of the present allottee. I shall make all other necessary enquiries myself. I cannot conceive why you should conceal the name of the present allottee from a woman, who if your history be well founded, is the victim of a thorough paced scoundrel.
I am, Sir,
Your obedient Servant,
(sgd) George Bradley
But not a word of correspondence, no fresh scrap of information, arrived for the next two and a half months. Not one step was taken nearer to resolving what had by now surely become a torment to Alice. Mr Bradley refers to her ‘intolerable position’ and the possibility of Henry being a ‘thorough paced scoundrel’, but we have no way of knowing if these descriptions are Alice’s. I doubt it; they sound much more like the words of her father and family solicitor, older men with a cynical suspicion of what the truth might be.
Mr Bradley followed up with the Admiralty on 4 September, the day before Alice’s first wedding anniversary, with another inquiry, given that so much time had elapsed without response.
Finally, in the first week of October, Alice got her answer.
Admiralty,
5th October 1918
Sir,
With reference to your letter of the 4th ultimo, and previous correspondence, relative to the wife of John H. Edwards, Stoker Petty Officer, 305849, I have to inform you that the question of withholding the information asked for by you has been re-considered, and, in the special circumstances, it has been decided to make an exception to the general rule in this case.
I have accordingly to inform you that this Petty Officer was married in the Parish Church of Falmouth on the 13th September 1906 to Ann Barrett, and that, in February last, the latter was living at No. 2, Pembroke Lane, Devonport.
I am, Sir,
Your obedient Servant,
(sgd) C. M. Muir,
for Accountant-General of the Navy.
Her husband was still married to Ann. She had not died giving birth to their baby son. She was living in their home on the Royal Navy base in the south of England, carrying on the unpaid labour of child-rearing, while John Henry Edwards enjoyed shore leave and—after a hasty wedding to satisfy appearances in Glasgow—the affections of his shipmate’s sister.
Alice reverted to her maiden name, though now it reverberated, if only between her own ears, with her humiliation of being neither married nor a maiden. Alice May Morrison Taylor fulfilled all the non-technical requirements of a spinster. Soon the people of Partick looked at her as they always had, with a mixture of respect and pity. The novelty of her having married a bigamist faded into the fabric of town life like a stain on carpet.
Yet how did Alice perceive herself? Double standards being what they are, I’m guessing her parents—perhaps in spite of efforts to avoid talking about it—made her feel like soiled goods, as though she would never appeal to any man now that she was no longer a virgin. What did the parishioners say about her? The members of her choirs? The neighbours? Perhaps they said nothing, and their silence roared in her ears as self-recrimination.
Or maybe Alice rejected their unspoken judgement, and felt furious that John’s lies—so many lies!—had damaged her reputation while he sailed clear away.
24
ON CAMPUS MY LOVE OF CONTEMPORARY jazz had all the social appeal of a cold sore. At the mention of jazz most people would stare at me, assume I was joking, and change the topic. ‘Doesn’t it all sound the same?’ asked one boy, who was obsessed with heavy metal, without irony.
In Sydney the word jazz conjured images of banjos and clarinets, white-suited horn players lifting their instruments in tandem from the seated front row of a big band. Somehow in the Australian popular imagination, jazz had become untethered from its African-American roots, cast off from its history of expressing the yearning for liberation from oppression. The recordings of John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie and Roy Haynes and Betty Carter that I listened to sounded nothing like the music I heard live every week, but nor did I expect it to. The gigs I heard were largely played by middle-class boys. White boys who longed to express themselves outside the rigid confines of rock and pop—and who’d grown up in a country that provided health insurance. While they might struggle to get a girlfriend and pay the rent, they had always been free.
On campus I wanted desperately to excel, but my English Lit essay result
s, like me, were unremarkable. An adolescence spent reading books and studying the piano had made me as useful for any real-world application as the pianists in the novels I had read. My anxiety at feeling out of my depth and my mediocre results sent me scurrying into hiding. I was too shy to ask for help, too afraid to turn up for an audition at the dramatic society or to volunteer for the Arts Revue, too self-conscious to become a member of the tennis club. I didn’t think that perhaps I had chosen the wrong subjects, or that possibly I wasn’t ready for university. Nor did I imagine that anyone else felt as stupid, shy and awkward as I did. I had long fantasised about meeting new people, but up close they terrified me. They might discover that nothing was going on beneath my polished surface, that the still waters I presented were in fact pretty shallow.
Instead I haunted the gloomy research stacks of Fisher Library; the grey metal shelves carried the burden of all the literary ghosts whose works rested there in peace. I clutched a paper scribbled with author surnames and Dewey decimal numbers like a scrap of hieroglyph, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. I had imagined my future would unfold like a pristine map, easy to read and the right way up at all times. I’d been wrong.
In that first year of university, I had a much better time off campus than on, reading books, studying for my piano performance diploma, working my volunteer and my three paid jobs. I spent my leisure time watching jazz musicians transcend self-consciousness to express themselves in public. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the contemporary jazz scene in Sydney consisted of dozens of bands, around twenty-five musicians, and about five venues. In addition to the Basement, my live music orbit took in the Harbourside Brasserie on the western side of the Harbour Bridge, the brightly lit Real Ale Cafe on King Street, the underground bunker of the Soup Plus Cafe on George, and the velvet darkness of Round Midnight in Kings Cross. Finding this live jazz netherworld was like stepping through the back of the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.
Girls at the Piano Page 15